WEEK 4: Interspecies justice: Towards a common world

In our final class, we will move beyond the paradigm of mastery and ask what it might mean to understand ecological life not as a collection of separate beings, but as a web of relations among multiple human and more-than-human worlds. We will consider Malcom Ferdinand’s invitation to understand ecology as “a confrontation with plurality, with others different from myself, leading to the foundation of a common world.” We will turn to questions of interspecies and social justice, interdependence and coexistence, and consider this idea of worldization. Our writing prompts will be informed by the question of what forms of justice might become possible if we attend to the multiple beings and relations that constitute our shared existence.